Yeah, many people don't want to read and understand, just copy and paste.
I saw that in a lot of people I worked with on projects, they just look for something to copy and paste from the Internet without even trying to understand what it does. Just looking for some command without even paying attention to the text around it.
I remember one girl once that I gave her the link to the documentation explaining step by step what she needed to do, a link I had to find myself and pass it to her, of course, even when it was her task. Those steps included some alternatives like "if you are in this situation, run this command, but if you are in this other situation, run this other command" but she ignored all the instructions on that page and started copying and pasting every command that was found there. When I asked her what she was doing and why she was running every command there without reading the explanations around them, she said she thought she just had to run all the commands on that page.
I'm starting to see this a lot. Some man-pages are very verbose and one might not have the time, but for the most part, opening a man page and lessing through it doesn't take too long, and it's usually up-to-date
Some man pages are just gigantic lists of unintuitive parameters in alphabetical order with no usage examples and even if you know how to search for text in a man page (forward slash then the text you want to search for) you're just stabbing in the dark.
Others are excellent.
The problem with man pages is that you never know if you're getting the former or the latter.
How can you feel good about yourself if you aren't shaming people with less technical capabilities? Next you'll say something crazy like believing in yourself. Nonsense, crazy person. Get out of here.
I get confused every time I install a distro and man isn't installed by default. I guess I get the bare minimum philosophy, but it throws me off every time. First thing I install is vim, man, git, and probably a couple other things I can't remember right now.
I do like a decent man page that has examples for us dummies and I have found that they have improved a lot over the years.
The best was on arch because I had no idea how to use pacman, which I needed to install man, when I needed how to use pacman. I will have to take a look at tldr. I mostly use Debian without a desktop environment, but have an Arch VM for gaming here and there. Works out.
Agreed, in any context where I'd open man I'd rather tldr instead. If you needed to read chunks of documentation like in man I'd rather just google the docs instead than clunkily try to read in terminal.
"tldr pages. Simplified and community-driven man pages. The tldr pages are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples."
If you're electing to use linux, you got time to burn. Spend a little time getting comfy with manpages. Little things like that really add up to being effective.
Reading man pages is a skill of it''s own and the quality of man pages vary.
However the ways of figuring out how to do something.
'Command -h' or 'command --help'
'man command'
Search online for 'command examples'.
Manpages are good reference documentation when you already know which tool to use and how to use it and just need to tweak something. They can often be overwhelming otherwise. Just look at the number of flags on any git command, for example.
You've nailed this here, yet get downvotes. The amount of times I've gone to a man page and my eyes glaze over. Really handy to learn new flags or if you forget, but as an introductory material. They don't work for everyone. People learn in different ways, sometimes by doing and my brain isn't wired this way.
The only "issue" with man pages is that they open in less and less is a bit too -- Vim-y. So you end up needing to read a manual on how to read manuals?
Does no one use info? I've worked with Linux a bit, and am currently taking a class on it. I mainly use man as well but I'm going to try info and see what happens